#39: Being an Anti-Racist (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 39th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com).Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 39, is it?
That's right.
Oh my God, 39.
Yes, we took Saturday off.
It was our anniversary.
And so we did anniversary stuff and it was hot.
It was hot both ways, really.
It was just really hot.
Yeah, so hot.
But anyway, it's also pretty hot.
I mean, you know, marriage gets a bad rap, but I love it and I love you, so that's just awesome.
And I love it and I love you, too.
Oh, isn't this an interesting moment that we are now doing with several thousand of our closest friends?
All right.
Indeed.
In any case, we are back to it, and there's of course no shortage of things going on, it being 2020.
The Democrats are up to their Democrat thing.
They're doing it over Zoom, because that's the new face-to-face.
We are also watching events unfold in Portland, things long predicted that are now manifest in our streets.
So maybe we should start there.
Start with Portland?
Yeah, let's talk a little Portland.
Let's talk a little Portland.
Yeah.
So, as most viewers and listeners will no doubt be aware, on Sunday night there was an event in downtown Portland in which a driver was pulled from his car My understanding is that the driver was actually, the driver who was male, was actually protecting a trans woman.
He was then attacked and chased through the streets of Portland.
He got in his car, drove away, and was chased by what appeared to be protesters, and then crashed his vehicle, at which point he was dragged from the vehicle.
Savagely beaten to the point of unconsciousness.
He survived and he is, I believe, still in the hospital recovering.
So, this happened.
People will no doubt remember that the Feds were pulled out of Portland, what is it going to be, two weeks ago or so, right?
Yep.
Sorry, I'm not sure what's going on here.
Good.
Okay.
The Feds were pulled out a couple weeks ago.
I guess I thought that you sort of had this.
I don't have the timeline exactly.
Well, I mean, there are still federal officers here, but their increased presence was decreased on the agreement that the local and state police were going to enforce the law in their stead, thereby creating a kind of absurd reversal of the narrative.
As if this was a win for...
For Governor Brown and Mayor Wheeler of Oregon and Portland respectively, when in fact what had been promised was that the local and state officials would do what they should have been doing in the first place, which was keeping the peace.
Right?
Right.
So DHS was pulled out with the promise that the state and local officials would step in and do the jobs that they should have been doing all along.
And, of course, they have not been allowed to, mostly.
They have been hamstrung, and they are mostly absent, it appears.
And this is not, presumably, because they are interested in being absent, because they have stopped wanting to do their jobs.
The mayor and the governor believe that the people who are yelling most loudly in the streets represent a majority of us, and I am quite certain, as I believe you are, as are the many, many people who are in Portland or just in Oregon, whom we've heard from, that this is not true.
This does not reflect the majority at all.
That the loudest people who are screaming for defunding of the police and a breakdown in social fabric do not actually represent What most people want.
In fact, I was talking this morning with a woman who says of herself that she just loathes Trump so much that she really has a hard time even being able to see it when he does something right.
And this is a real phenomenon.
You know, good on her for recognizing that she has this trait, but she can say that and be, you know, thrilled about what the Democrats have on offer and also say of Portland, it is such a shame.
It is so horrifying what is being allowed to happen to our city.
And this is a woman who is a native Portlander.
She's our age-ish and she was born and raised here as well and has been here and has Raised her children here as well and uh you know I was I was down there early yesterday morning.
I was downtown early yesterday morning and you know took a took a walk and saw One thing that we've been saying throughout, which is that the protests turn into riots after dark, right?
The thing doesn't happen at all times of day.
But even in the early morning, what you could see was the vandalism.
Almost all the storefronts downtown boarded up.
The just incredible amount of trash like even basic city services have been suspended the homeless encampments they're not only growing but are becoming more chaotic, more trashed.
The other thing that I saw, which was, which maybe saddened me the most, was what appeared to be a number of storekeepers, shopkeepers, who were out on the sidewalks cleaning up the mess from the night before.
So there were, this is a place that hasn't seen rain in a while, and you could walk from a street that was filled with trash and dry and dusty and just, you know, just really disgusting in terms of level of Cleanliness.
And then you'd come upon a scene in which all of the sidewalks were wet and there was an old man, you know, or woman with a hose or with a rag scrubbing or hosing and cleaning off clearly what had happened the night before.
And in this case, the night before was in fact the night where this horrible beating happened.
And so we have a situation in which you've got a tiny number of people who are reliably breaking the law nightly.
And this is, you have certainly heard people claim this is a mostly peaceful protest, which is a nonsense claim in light of the fact that the violence breaks out utterly reliably.
Night after night.
So what you have is a riot with an on-ramp every night.
And the costs of that are increasingly being borne by citizens who are attempting to make a living in the midst of this occurring.
The city which is supposed to make that possible by enforcing the law evenly, is not enforcing it well at all, and certainly not evenly.
That is to say, all you have to do is mouth certain pseudo-truths in order to evade the law, and the costs are gonna fall arbitrarily on the rest of us.
And the thing that I just can't get over is that this is actually reshaping cities.
We see many cities now involved in the process of quote-unquote defunding their police and predictably enough you've got a massive rise in crime as if anything else could possibly have been the product of this.
There is no reliable measure at all of how many people actually want their police defunded and so it's kind of Like an amplitude thing.
There are some people in the street who say that that's what they want, and so the governmental apparatus is now acting as if that's representative, which it obviously isn't, nor did they make any attempt to figure out whether it was.
And the consequences are predictable, ghastly, getting worse at an amazing rate, and yet… Apparently last month had the highest homicide rate in Portland of any month in 30 years.
And how was it supposed to be otherwise?
I mean, it was just clear that this would be the result of effectively advertising that policing is now suspect.
We want less of it.
Of course, that's a beacon to anybody who wants to engage in crime, to settle scores, whatever it is that they're doing.
This was simply inevitable.
Yeah.
No, I mean, we've talked a number of times before about what defund the police might mean, what it could mean, the Mott & Bailey switch that people pull who like to trot it out, and when they will then claim that, no, we don't mean abolish, we just mean move some of those resources away to social services, etc.
But we've also said a few times, but maybe less, that one of the obvious effects of taking money away from the police in advance of fixing other societal problems for whom the police are there to respond will of course make things worse and will make policing worse faster.
Right?
What we need, what I think almost everyone can get behind, is we always want better police no matter how good they are.
We want better police and better police and no matter how good the police currently are, police and currently is.
And the way to get better police is not to pull money out.
We want to attract the best people.
If you start at this moment, who 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago Even five years ago, who might have been interested in being a police officer, is going to look at the state of policing in the United States and say, ah, yes, that's the job for me.
I think I can do good there.
There will still be those people, that minority of people, who go into policing or try to go into policing for motives that are bad.
Those people aren't going to be deterred by this, presumably.
Who are going to be deterred are the good people.
The good future police, who are exactly the people who we want on the streets.
Now, there's a lot else to be done.
We need better training.
We probably need more in urban centers, more cops on the beat, on the streets, as opposed to patrolling in cars.
There are a number of things that have been I would suggest it as ways to reform and, you know, in some cases get back to some of the better policing of past eras and move forward to better policing the future.
But the way to do that is to actually put more resources towards policing such that we can get crime under control and then, and then hopefully, we can move towards less policing.
I of course agree with that and have said similar things, but I want to go even one step further.
Yeah.
Which is, if you remove the resources that currently fund the police, if you reduce the number of police on the street, the result will be more brutal policing.
That in fact, brutality is a substitute for resources.
That in effect, if a smaller force needs to maintain order, what it will do is it will wield weapons more aggressively in order that the penalty that people experience for breaking the law goes up so that you don't need more police.
And so, this is certainly going to increase exactly the problem that the protesters claim that they are responding to, which is the brutality.
It will decrease non-lethal force, but it will not decrease overall use of force.
It will decrease non-lethal force relative to potentially lethal force.
I'm increasingly loathe to even use these distinctions.
I think the point is, if you don't like brutal policing, then underfund them.
That's how you'll get it.
And frankly, I don't even trust… Wait, wait.
I feel like you reversed a sign there.
You want to say that again?
If you… I don't know what I did say.
What I meant to say was, if you want brutal policing, Underfund the police right that that that is an automatic and that it from the point of view of this Movement that is potentially exactly what they want because really this movement isn't about policing this movement is about power and resources and the justification for it is that the police are so dangerous and to people from certain racial groups that they have to be abolished because there's nothing else you could do.
And so if you want to create brutal, arbitrary policing and then broadcast those instances against people from certain racial groups and say, see, told you, then this would be the way to get there.
So.
No, and we have, I honestly don't, I don't know how Portland gets saved.
And I'm, I'm, I'm pissed.
I'm angry at this point.
We've moved to this beautiful city that has so much promise.
You actually proposed to me a day or two ago.
Couldn't Portland replace the other dying West Coast cities as a destination for some of the wealth that is being honorably generated in, for instance, San Francisco?
It is such a gorgeous, culturally rich, culinarily rich, natural resources rich place.
And at the moment, it is falling apart.
And what do we have?
We have a weak mayor who has done nothing to impress himself on us in any way.
And his main contender to the throne come November is someone who actively declares herself Antifa, pro-Antifa, and has been photographed in a skirt with pictures of Lenin and Mao on it.
I mean, like, these are the contenders for the mayor of It's insane!
It's insane, but, you know, the really depressing thing about it is that, um, okay, this is very childish.
This is, um, the dumbest version of Marxism that has ever taken over anything.
And yet, the… There have been some pretty dumb versions.
Nope, I don't think there's ever been one this dumb.
This is so incoherent and the things that it says are so far from plausible that I think actually just in terms of the stupidity of the claims, the implausibility of the claims, this one takes the cake, so to speak.
But there will be no cake.
There's not going to be any cake.
But they could eat it and have it if they want it.
In any case, the irony here that I see is that, you know, we are in touch with some large sample of the smartest people in the English-speaking world.
They don't know what to do.
People are fleeing the major cities, they're talking about the collapse of civilization, they don't have a clue how to counteract this.
You and I, who I think are doing as much as we can, are frankly increasingly looking into a camera and saying, how could anything this dumb wield this much power?
I mean, we know that the answer resides in game theory, but nonetheless, you would imagine That given the ability to see what's coming and how dangerous it is, and the frankly, ghastly threat that it constitutes to the West, not just the US, but the West writ large, that We would somehow be able to coordinate a response around how do we prevent this from happening?
How do we address the frustration in a way that does not take the rug out from under all of the structures on which we depend so that we don't have a power vacuum that allows the Russians, the Chinese, who knows who to flood in and in effect govern the planet.
Yeah.
So at some level, It is amazing how impotent the would-be adults are in the face of these children throwing a tantrum.
And I really don't understand why that conversation is not taking place.
The conversation is so much about the tantrum and so little about what the proper response to a tantrum that threatens to disrupt everything is.
We are not having that conversation.
No, I mean some of us are, but the fact is, I mean this is a point that you have been making for decades really, is that these kinds of things sneak in in clever packaging.
That with the rise of consultants and PR firms and publicity managers and being on brand and all of this, that we saw through basically the second half of the 20th century, You increasingly have movements that are savvy to human psychology sufficient, whether or not the people who are saying the things know what they're doing.
It really doesn't take that at all.
In fact, it may be more powerful if they don't know the effect of what they're doing.
All it takes really is putting together the right sound bites.
And so, you know, we have been saying, and I do increasingly hear and see people saying online, you know, when you say that Black Lives Matter, do you mean to support the obvious and true sentiment that Black Lives Matter, lowercase l, lowercase m, or are you referring to the movement, hashtag Black Lives Matter, which is not what it seems?
And people say this, but still, still now, it has fooled a tremendous number of people.
Still now, the Don't Hurt Me walls and placards are up all over the place, and still now we have these weak mayors, weak governors saying, oh yeah, probably it would be a good idea to get rid of the task force that considers whether or not gun violence is an issue here.
It's incoherent, but what they are doing is responding to words as if words are truth.
And responding to words as if words are truth is actually almost like the flip of the mistake that postmodernism makes.
Where, you know, postmodernism is like, there's no objective reality and your truth is just as valid as my truth.
And now we're saying, okay, but here I've got this phrase, and because it uses these words, the words that it uses must be reflective of what our goals are, even though we're now just like, don't look at the man behind the curtain.
We're going to go back here and do whatever we're doing while you shout about our phrase and get more people on board.
Yeah, I see it, but increasingly I don't think this has anything to do with words.
This has to do with some sort of a tipping point in which, demographically speaking, something, as a result of COVID, as a result of shifts that have been in motion over the course of decades, Is finally in a position where if it all just simply points in the same direction, it is in a position not to make anything happen.
It doesn't have the capacity to build.
The people involved in it don't know what to build.
They wouldn't know how to build.
Well, building and making something happen aren't the same thing.
Well, if making something happen is tearing something down that somebody else has built, then that is the thing it is in a position to do.
And the question is, I think something has failed In the would-be adult class is the point and because the other thing because the thing that we are up against is so Difficult to ignore and Fascinating in its absurdity.
We are not looking at ourselves and saying how is it that we cannot just simply level with people and say Those people obviously don't know how to run anything You can tell that they don't based on the fact that they say things like defund the police, and it's not even taking months.
Just even the initial forays into reducing policing are immediately causing crime waves.
They're causing, you know, increase in the murder rate.
This is not hard to detect that, you know, you can just test the hypothesis.
Do they know how to run a city?
Are they right that removing the police will make things safer?
Clearly not.
We know that already, right?
So why is it that we cannot now look at each other and say, all right, hypothesis tested.
How do we stop them from wielding power?
Yeah, well, I mean, in part, again, the problem is also in numeracy.
I saw a comment on Willamette Week today or yesterday discussing Mayor Ted Wheeler's suggestion to maybe bring back a little bit of the gun violence task force that was totally eradicated, I don't know when, a month or two ago.
And one of the comments was, oh right, like, you think that this uptick in murders has anything to do with getting rid of that gun violence task force?
Don't you realize we're in a pandemic, man?
Like, okay.
Like, that is certainly true.
That being in lockdown for months helped get so many people out on the streets who wouldn't otherwise be on the streets.
And in fact, I've seen people admit, well, you know what?
I lost my job.
I don't see what's going on in my future.
So yeah, I'm going to get out there and protest with other people because what the hell else am I going to do, right?
So I do think, and we could test that, that that is a real correlation.
But it is also quite possible for people to imagine that that thing that I just said, that the highest murder rate in Portland in 30 years, which happened in July, is due to COVID-19 lockdowns, is a plausible rejoinder to the now actually much more recently than COVID-19 lockdowns, actually the police were told they couldn't do their police work anymore.
Well, the police were told they couldn't do their police work, and the police were incentivized not to do anything.
Because to the extent that they do anything, and some edit, right?
A policeman who now makes a mistake of any kind runs the risk of it being the next catalyst for violence, personal or otherwise.
And so... So actually, to pick up on that.
We are not downplaying the fact that police brutality does exist and that it should be minimized as much as possible, which all police would agree with as well.
But anytime any policeman does anything at this point that could be understood in a less generous light, it will be understood that way.
And this reminds me of something that your brother had said to us as Evergreen was blowing up and unfolding.
What he said was, we're watching the protests turn into riots on campus, and just like one crazy error after another by these people in charge there.
I'm like, surely the world will see it.
Nope, the world would spin it and you know, and the mainstream media wouldn't show up and we'd get one PR story after another.
But what Eric said to us was, They're allowed to do all of that, but you guys aren't allowed a foot fault.
There are no foot faults allowed in this game.
Because the media, the mainstream narrative machine, which cannot understand people on the left going, you know, saying, raising their hand and saying, actually, you people don't speak for us and you're not on the left.
It doesn't track, and so we were being watched like hawks for any errors that we might make, any evidence that we were not what we appeared.
Right.
But the problem is we are now at the point where we are actually watching the wealthy flee the cities that they have turned into personal playgrounds and leaving them, undermining them by eliminating the tax base.
But, you know, also just effectively abandoning the rest of us who live in these places.
And I guess the question is, if you think about the effort involved in picking your family up and moving them to wherever you're planning to go in order to protect your family, and believe me, I get the impulse, right?
If it were simple for us to do it, we would certainly have to consider it.
But the effort that is being put into people of means moving their families out of harm's way, which they obviously see coming, is immense.
Why is that effort not being put into preventing this collapse?
In other words, it's the same failure of game theory at every level.
Right?
You may be able to move your family out of a city that's in danger of a collapse.
That does not protect you from the West collapsing and China filling the power vacuum.
So in some sense you are still, yes, you may be acting to protect your family at the expense of the whole, but you can't protect your family from what unfolds downstream of that.
This is the same thing that happens when you mouth the words, you know, Trans women are women in order to get the mob to leave you alone you strengthen the mob you survive into the next day, but the point is the institution that you're part of now is Weakened and eventually topples and you'll pay the price anyway, so I can't see why the Slightly longer-term analysis about where your well-being is
Is actually protected, does not persuade all of these people who are obviously persuaded of something very important if it's causing them to actually load up their lives and put their stuff in a van and go somewhere, right?
Why it doesn't trigger the kind of emergency response that I would expect would exist in all of us.
I guess I'm not sure what you're arguing.
It clearly is triggering their personal emergency response.
And individuals don't have the power of society to change policy.
I'm not sure what it is that you are suggesting.
I wish there was a different response, but I don't know what you're advocating for.
Well, for one thing, I would imagine that watching the electoral slow motion train wreck unfold would not be something that people just say, well, OK, I'll vote for one of the standard bearers because what else would you do?
I would imagine that the people who do have influence over these entities would be utilizing it just selfishly.
You would expect, I mean, look, people have spent a tremendous amount of resource corrupting our government.
That means they have power over it.
They could wield that power in the people's interest, just cynically, to stave off this disaster.
They won't do it.
Why not?
Whatever it is that corrupted the government has the power to stop this by liberating resources that could actually be applied in a way that would make sense.
Instead, they're walking away and they're moving their families?
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, I'm not sure this works with what you just said about people walking away and moving their families.
Like, I don't exactly know who...
What that demographic is.
But at some level, if you're talking about the sort of generational level analysis that you and Eric specifically have done a lot of, it's the boomers, largely, who have created a system in which they are corralling and concentrating much of the wealth, and it is their children, the millennials,
Who are increasingly the up-and-comers making decisions that are postmodern at best in places like academia, like the media, like tech, like everything really, right?
So you have that sort of one-two punch with the smaller generations of us Gen X and our rising Gen Z kids coming up without as much voice because we just don't have as many numbers.
And because the boomers were the last generation to really concentrate wealth in a meaningful way, that those with wealth are protecting it.
They may presumably be helping out the kids to some degree, and you know, not all of them.
We taught mostly millennials for 15 years, and almost all of our students were frankly remarkable.
Highly capable.
Whether or not they came in highly capable or recognizing their capabilities or not.
But frankly, they were terrific.
And so, you know, I don't mean to slander an entire generation just as, you know, just as not all boomers this and not all Gen X that, right?
But To a large degree, it is not the Gen Xers nor the Gen Zers who are so confused about the nature of male versus female or, you know, or any of this other garbage that we are being expected to accept in the name of this sort of intersectional woke ideology.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe I'm just, you know, I'm now... Zach, could you put up the article on New York?
So this article was published.
It was self-published this week, and it makes a very compelling case that A, many people, maybe a million already, have fled New York City as a result of a couple of different things.
One of them is that COVID revealed, in some sense, that a lot of the jobs, the highly prized jobs in New York, can be done from anywhere.
And so there's no real reason to be, you know, gathering in Midtown.
It forced remote work in a way that people maybe couldn't force their employers to it before.
Right.
And so, you know, people are discovering that, you know, there's a lot of downside to living in New York.
But people who love it, people who, you know, have made the most of the cultural opportunities that it provides and, you know, the great restaurants and all of that are fleeing in droves.
Right.
I mean, you know, arts and theater are not happening for the foreseeable future.
We're missing that here too.
The restaurants are closing, first because of COVID.
But, you know, at least in Portland, I can't speak in New York, but restaurants were closing Shutting down despite trying everything they could to persist, and then just as they are being able to come back open, then protests happen, and the protests quickly turn into riots, and vandalism and looting meant that either the resources themselves were damaged, or people just don't want to go down to eat in places where there's going to be nightly violence.
Of course they don't.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what I'm feeling.
And I'm definitely feeling something, you know, it's not just ominous.
I mean, we've known that for years.
We've seen this coming.
But I think I'm feeling, I'm feeling betrayed.
Yeah, for sure.
I'm feeling like the people who often speak the loudest about the magic of the market and what it has allowed them to accomplish and the need for personal responsibility, because given a market You can wield personal responsibility to self-betterment at an extraordinary level.
The people who say this are now abandoning ship.
Knowing full well what's coming for those of us who aren't in a position to do it.
And my feeling is, actually, we deserved better.
You know, you and I have suffered from the accusation that we somehow fueled this post-modernism from the beginning.
There's never been any truth to it, right?
You and I have been literally fighting this since we ourselves were college students, right?
We didn't generate this.
And yet, we also... Nor facilitate it.
We didn't generate it, we didn't facilitate it, we fought it all along.
We, however, did not make maximum use of the market, right?
We've made a living, we've done well, but we have not generated enough wealth that we can just pick our family up and go.
And so, why exactly is this going to fall in on us?
It's totally foreseeable, we've been very clear and I think we've been courageous about pointing out what the hazard was, you know, even when the hazard was very specifically targeted at us and not general and people belittled us for making too much of it, right?
And so I just, I guess I'm... So you're saying betrayed, go on.
I'm feeling like I'm seeing various different flavors of a failure of patriotism.
Right?
There's a massive failure of patriotism on the left, which is of course well known.
Right?
The left likes to demonize the country.
But it isn't all of us on the left.
Some of us are very clear on what's great about the country and we want to see it democratized so that it reaches the maximum number of people.
Right?
But then people elsewhere, maybe not so far on the left, who have been very aggressively selling the idea of the magic of
The market and the opportunities provided here do not appear ready to defend the structure other than kind of online where it's cheap right and Anyway, I guess I mean this leads to a lot of things, you know, we are hearing a tremendous number of people who are
You know, 10 years ago, would have been, you know, prominent in the gun control debate, who are now buying guns.
And frankly, they're rational to do it.
We've certainly done it.
But the point is, I think the Second Amendment debate has ended.
And there's been no acknowledgement that The argument that firearms are actually a hedge against tyranny, which is the correct argument, that maybe the founders didn't see this particular version of tyranny coming, but that in a general sense there was something true about that argument that, you know, I don't know if the Second Amendment debate is over, but I sort of have the sense it is based on the number of people who have bought firearms
Knowing that civilization is more fragile than we understood and that they may need to defend themselves.
I don't think so, unfortunately.
And I don't have the story pulled up, so I won't be able to find it quickly.
But there's some case being brought, I think, in a New York state court to abolish the NRA.
Right.
And, you know, the NRA is not the Second Amendment.
Right.
But that argument will continue.
Well, I'm not so sure that it has that much fuel because the, you know, what that argument requires is a great many people behind it.
And to the extent that people, I mean, I also don't have the data to bring up, but gun sales have gone through the roof twice now in, you know, in less than a year, right?
We saw it at the beginning of COVID and then we saw it at the beginning of the George Floyd protests.
So I think the thing is, We are watching people register their personal incentives in ways that are measurable.
One of them has to do with gun sales and I mean either people are completely hypocritical and they're not going to recognize that Their own instinct to buy firearms undercuts their argument that civilization depends on tightly regulating.
I mean, you know, look, I'm in both places here because I don't want to see, you know, I don't want to see the proliferation of firearms that are going to result in lots of Lethal violence on the other hand.
I was going to say, I mean, you, you and I, and I think you do hold both of those positions.
I think that, you know, wanting regulation and tracking of guns is not inconsistent with understanding that gun ownership is written into our constitution and is something that actually many of us can increasingly see a need for.
I don't see how these are inconsistent positions.
Well, it depends what version of the gun control argument you're going to level.
I mean, I agree we have to have regulation.
You're not allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
So therefore, it is true that your right to bear arms is inherently going to have to be limited.
And that means we have to draw a line somewhere.
But the line is usually about Personal firearms and the thing that has never existed on the gun control side of that debate is an acknowledgement of the interaction between firearms and tyranny.
In other words, the prevention of tyranny is something that the right very frequently says about firearms and the left pretends it's not a real argument.
And I think people are now discovering in their own lives that as the forces that maintain civil order begin to break down, they fear tyranny and anarchy and that they see this as somehow relevant so.
I'm not saying there obviously has to be rational regulation, but what that rational regulation involves and what price people are willing to pay for it seems to me will have changed as a result of what people are discovering.
True.
Let's see, there were some other things.
I was just going to suggest that we segue to some of the ideology that is cryptically and not so cryptically at base of the movement that has taken to the streets.
That most people watching will be less intimately familiar with the actions happening on the nation's Urban Streets at the moment, and more familiar with the kinds of diversity, inclusion, and equity trainings that are coming to an office near you, if they haven't already.
So, I forgot to look up which episode, or a couple of episodes, we talked in some depth about Robin DiAngelo's white fragility, and I'm not prepared to do a complete takedown of Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist just yet, because I've only gotten through, I don't know, a third of it.
But I want to talk a little bit about this, because the author of this book is a black man, unlike Robin DiAngelo, who's a white woman.
Her book has begun to fall out of favor, apparently, in some of these D.I.E.
diversity, inclusion, equity trainings.
And his, Kendi's book is becoming more popular.
And in fact, he's a rising star, as he has been for a while.
He's on the cover of this month's The Atlantic with an article called The Power of American Denial.
And so I just have a couple of excerpts, not the usual excerpts.
I try to read excerpts that are Enlightening in some ways, and I do not find anything about what I have read of his stuff enlightening, but it's important for us all to know what is being said.
In part, because just like D'Angelo has redefined what racist means, and the way that you will hear people saying to you, well, if you're a white person, you are inherently racist, that comes mostly out of the D'Angelo playbook.
Well, Kennedy framed this like, you're racist or you're anti-racist, and that is a complete solution set.
Like, that is his framing.
And just like Black Lives Matter and other feel-good, sound-good phrases, of course you want to be anti-racist.
Obviously, especially if the only other option on the table, or allowed by your humanity, is to be racist.
Of course you choose anti-racist.
Now he, unlike D'Angelo, gives us a choice, right?
Like you can actually aspire to be non-racist.
I'm not sure he ever lets you there, so that we still have this sort of original sin issue, but let me just use his words to define what he means, right?
So from this September 2020 issue of the Atlantic, he says, this is Kendi, from 1977 to 2018, the General Social Survey asked whether black Americans, quote, have worse jobs, income and housing than white people, mainly due to discrimination.
Kendi writes, there are only two answers to this question.
The racist answer is no.
It presumes that racist discrimination no longer exists and that racial inequities are the result of something being wrong with black people.
The anti-racist answer is yes.
It presumes that nothing is wrong or right, inferior or superior about any racial group, so the explanation for racial disparities must be discrimination.
In 2008, he continues, as Obama was headed for the White House, only 34.5% of respondents answered yes, a number I will call the anti-racist rate.
This was the second lowest anti-racist rate of the 41-year polling period.
The rate rose to 37.7% in 2010, perhaps because the emergence of the Tea Party forced a reckoning for some white Americans, but it fell back down to 34.9% in 2012 and 34.6% in 2014.
So, he has defined, just to have more quotes here, but what he has done here is said that, once again, the actual question being asked by the General Social Survey is, do black Americans have worse jobs, incoming housing than white people, mainly due to discrimination?
There are only two answers to this question.
Now, of course, that question is itself a whole bunch of questions, and you might legitimately say, well, I can't answer that question.
That question is too many questions already, right?
But Kendi puts that aside.
He says, no, actually, either yes, it's mainly due to discrimination, in which, ding, ding, ding, you win.
You're an anti-racist, or at least you're aspiring to be.
Or, no, I think that some other explanation is also in play here.
No, you lose, you're a racist.
These are the only two possible answers that he will allow for.
So, I would point out also that this, while Kendi, as far as I know, isn't involved in the sex isn't binary part of the Intersectional movement, it's all the same group.
And guess what?
They're wrong on both fronts.
Like, sex is a binary.
Like, male and female are real and that's what we have and have for 500 million years.
But disparities in outcomes between racial groups?
That's not a binary.
Disparities and outcomes between racial groups undoubtedly has a strong explanatory variable in historic racism and some explanatory variable in current racism, but the idea that it is the only thing that you are allowed to consider Else you have demonstrated that you are a racist is not a legitimate rhetorical tactic, but I will say this for Kendi.
He is an excellent, what would it be, rhetorician?
Rhetoric guy.
I'm not sure.
He's very smart.
He's great with language.
I'm sure he could write and talk circles around D'Angelo, who's much simpler to get rid of.
So just to point out a few more of his definitions from the book, from How to Be an Anti-Racist, there are three more places where he sort of defines his new coding of racist versus anti-racist.
1.
If racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person's race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist.
The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity.
If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.
He then goes on to say, if discrimination is creating equity, which is to say equal outcomes, that's what equity means, equal outcomes, then it is anti-racist.
So discrimination that creates equal outcomes is anti-racist.
This is why he should and could and absolutely must really strive to be not anti-racist.
Certainly not racist, but not anti-racist either, because that's ridiculous.
Two, from page 20 of his book, there is no such thing as a not racist idea.
Only racist ideas and anti-racist ideas.
So what is a racist idea?
A racist idea is any idea that suggests that one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.
Even like marathon running?
Well, that's... we're getting there.
Okay.
Page 64.
To be anti-racist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences.
To be anti-racist is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups as a problem of policy.
So, I thought we might discuss a few examples of people of European descent being worse or more susceptible to things.
And using Kendi's examples, then, we're clearly engaging in racism when we talk about Europeans not being as good at something.
The obvious example, as you just pointed out, Brett, is Marathon running.
So, Zach, if you want to show this briefly.
This is a 2012 article from The Atlantic, the very same once great monthly publication that is now putting this kind of ridiculous thinking on its cover.
Why Kenyans Make Such Great Runners, A Story of Genes and Cultures.
It's quite a good article.
From it, I'm not sure if I can find it.
Zach, if you want to give me my screen back.
I'm going to read a a excerpt from this article which finds, which doesn't find, this article is not a piece of original research, which points to the now well-known finding that Kenyans are better, and it's not just even Africans per se, but Kenyans are better at long-distance running.
Kenyans and Ethiopians is the Yeah, you know it's actually it's not as clear apparently for Ethiopians.
The finding, the statistical finding for Kenyans is much more clear and in fact it seems to be a particular tribe within Kenya.
Okay.
So here we have an extended quotation from this 2012 Atlantic article.
It turns out that Kenyan success may be innate.
Two separate European-led studies in a small region in Western Kenya, which produces most of the race winners, found that young men there could, with only a few months training, reliably outperform some of the West's best professional runners.
In other words, they appeared to have a physical advantage that is common to their community, making it probably genetic.
The studies found significant differences in body mass index and bone structure between the Western pros and the Kenyan amateurs who had bested them.
The studied Kenyans had less mass for their height, longer legs, shorter torsos, and more slender limbs.
One of the researchers described the Kenyan physical differences as bird-like, noting that these traits would make them more efficient runners, especially over long distances.
Surprisingly, the 2012 Atlantic article continues, Western popular writing about Kenyans' running success seems to focus less on these genetic distinctions and more on cultural differences.
For years, the cultural argument has been that Kenyans become great runners because they often run several miles to and from school every day.
But about a decade ago, someone started asking actual Kenyans if this was true, and it turned out to be merely a byproduct of Western imaginations.
14 of 20 surveyed Kenyan race winners said they'd walked or ridden the bus to school, like normal children do.
Another cultural argument says they run barefoot, which develops good habits.
But if this were true, then surely the far more populated countries of South Asia, where living without shoes is also common, would dominate over Kenyans.
Another ascribes it to the quote simple food of Kenya but this again is true of many other parts of the world and Kenya's not so great health record suggests the country has not discovered the secret to great nutrition and there is a cringe-inducing theory still prevalent that Kenyans history as herders mean they get practice running as they chase their sheep across the countryside.
So, I mean, I think there's a lot to be said here, but one of the things to be said here is that all of those cultural hypotheses that are apparently preferred in the Western press are themselves pretty freaking racist, right?
They smeck of this old school cultural anthropology, which was like, okay, we're going to come in on our, you know, our white anthropologists on our white horses.
Not that anthropologists tend to ride in our horses, And, you know, and save you from yourselves and, you know, point out how your pre-industrial ways actually make you better at some things, but, you know, unspoken, wink, wink, probably not so good at some other things.
So, you know, that's actually some anthropological racism built into those stories about, you know, culture being the reason that these Kenyans with, let's see, Yeah, I'm not sure I find, I mean, I find those anthropological explanations tone-deaf and ignorant.
I'm not sure I find them racist.
marathon records than people from other parts of the world. - Yeah, I'm not sure I find, I mean, I find those anthropological explanations tone deaf and ignorant.
I'm not sure I find them racist, but we also have to be a bit careful here because the physiological and morphological differences between populations are large and they account for things in the real world that have nothing to do with discrimination, right?
In fact, discrimination has denied advantages to people who would have been superior at sports until they finally broke into them.
So we've seen that in boxing, we've seen that in baseball, we've seen it in tennis.
And, you know, the fact is those differences are real.
They are based in trade-offs, right?
So it is the fact that different habitats select for different things that result in different populations playing different sports better than others.
That does not inherently have any implication whatsoever for cognition.
Could there be differences in cognition?
There could be, but they are much less likely.
And so what I'm troubled by is that the examples that we have to resort to in order to prove that the logic that Candy is deploying here is faulty, because we can see Very clear examples in which physiology and morphology explain something that has nothing to do with racism and does generate the pattern, proving there's a third category of explanation.
But that suggests that what we're saying is, wink wink, that same third category is what explains differences in success between populations, when in fact that probably does have a lot to do with historical racism, which doesn't say anything about modern racism.
Again, I'm feeling just a bit hopeless because the real problem with his argument is that almost nobody has the patience and the knowledge set to be able to go through it and see exactly where the little logical errors are that have these gigantic effects on the conclusion, right?
So you have to be able to spot those things.
Basically, at some level, I feel like all of us need to spend a week going through these arguments and figuring out which part of them is true, which part of them is faulty, what implication it has for the conclusion.
Because otherwise, we're going to tear civilization apart over the fact that most people do not know how to take apart Kendi's argument.
Right.
Right.
Go ahead.
We've got Kenyans being better at marathon running.
At the disease level, we have said race is a bastardization, a messy, imprecise at best, inaccurate, very, very often, if not always, representation of a real genetic and evolutionary concept called population.
And we can see with regard to disease also that there are distinctions between groups.
Tay-Sachs is concentrated among Ashkenazi Jews, right?
Sickle being homozygous for sickle cell anemia is concentrated among African Americans within North America.
Right?
So those are observations that are borne out by the testing that is accurate.
And in Kendi's rubric, pointing out that those observations are true is itself a racist act.
So, to pretend that they're not true would be the only way forward to be anti-racist, which is obviously not a tenable position to stand on, right?
'cause like the foundation is really unstable.
You have something to say?
Yeah, I just wanted to point out that in part, this argument is built, it's not about logic.
It's about power, and you can tell it's about power because it's so categorical, right?
And so, the right challenge to it is something like, let's imagine a situation in which, Some group of violent white identitarians are kidnapping black people and killing them, right?
Where the explanation is 100% racism.
It is still not correct in that case to say the only possibility is this.
In other words, the idea that a logical argument requires, as you point out, it requires a complete solution set of answers that could be right.
Even when there's no currency to one of those answers, it still exists as a formal possibility.
And any argument that says the formal possibilities that aren't an important player in the story are no longer formal possibilities Is about ruling them out for reasons that aren't logical.
They're about power.
They're about power.
That's right.
And the fact that he's defining, and this is now spreading throughout all of these diversity, inclusion, and equity workplace trainings that many of you have been forced to sit through, that he is defining the solution set as racist versus anti-racist.
And anti-racist is, he's not ambiguous about this, it requires equal Outcomes for any group that you could define.
Any group.
Which also means you can just create your own group and say, ah, I'm underrepresented because I just created myself and I don't find myself over there, so you'd better hire me because I need to be represented there.
Yeah, it's a loophole.
I can invent a new gender.
My gender is one that oscillates between male and female.
I spend two-thirds of my time male, one-third of my time female, and I just reverberate back and forth.
I have bad news for you.
I don't think that's a new gender.
I think it's been done.
Touche.
Alright, it's a little hard to know how to come back from that.
Well, you could publicly, for the first time here, announce what your actual pronouns are.
The pronouns I use for myself are me and I. Yeah, but with regard to the pod of orca that you identify as?
Oh, I definitely identify as a pod of orca.
And, uh, why is that again?
Is that because it gives voice to my black and white sides?
I don't know.
Something.
Yeah, yeah.
You're adult and you're juvenile.
You're the yin and the yang.
Enough of this playing with these very dangerous concepts.
Yeah, well actually, so a few more things from the book and then I have something that a teacher, a public school teacher who had to sit through some faculty and staff training in the last couple of weeks sent me in which supposedly, you know, which is built on all of this D'Angelo Kendi style thinking.
But just, you know, other things that he says in this book, he explains, he takes some time to explain why pre-modern Islamic slave traders were not pursuing racist policies.
Wait a minute.
It's going to take me a second.
Well, yeah, it would.
It should take you a long second, actually.
A very long second.
I did not see this coming.
Nope, nope, nope, nope.
He says, pre-modern Islamic slave traders, like their Christian counterparts in pre-modern Italy, were not pursuing racist policies.
They were enslaving what we now consider to be Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike.
At the dawn of the modern world, the Portuguese began to exclusively trade African bodies.
Prince Henry's sailors made history when they navigated past the feared black hole of Cape Bojador off Western Sahara and brought enslaved Africans back to Portugal.
So, I'm sure that he would not say that he was being an apologist for slavers who weren't being slavers in a racial way, but it certainly seems like that's what he's doing.
He's focusing on racialized, by which he actually means just, you know, geographically focused.
And, you know, elsewhere in the book, he makes it clear that actually geography isn't race, that race is not real.
And so, you know, he's going back and forth between all sorts of arguments and being inconsistent.
But he makes a point of sort of excluding the pre-modern Islamic slave traders from his ire because they were equal opportunity slavers or something.
So that's one thing.
And so, you know, he obviously points out the flaw in his own argument, which is that even in the case of a completely racialized slave trade, you don't know that it would have been if the geography had been distributed differently.
A couple pages later he talks about Linnaeus, who as we know as biologists and as many people who remember their high school biology will remember, was the guy who first tried to start categorizing life on earth.
with these binomial species names like Homo sapiens, Phyllis silvestris, Canis familiaris.
Sylvestris.
Sylvestris canis domesticus or canis familiaris?
Canis familiaris.
That's humans, domestic cats, domestic dogs.
And Linnaeus was, as we know, actually very confused at one level.
He identified a scalinatory in which he were ascending to become better and better and better, and humans were the top.
And Kendi focuses on Linnaeus did not restrict his hierarchical Strange and misguided thinking to things outside of humans, but he also had a hierarchy of races themselves, which is of course racist and also not at all surprising and totally in keeping with the rest of what he did.
So, I don't know if Kendi ignores the fact that Linnaeus was consistently hierarchical and not a good thinker in this regard because he doesn't know what happened or because it serves his argument that the history of Western science is racist.
And in this case it's a, you know, it's a classic example because Linnaeus is pre-Darwinian.
Right.
And so the fact is Linnaeus didn't know that he was interfacing with a world in which all of these different coexisting species were actually coexisting from a shared ancestry and therefore the scala naturae doesn't make any sense.
So, you know, the point is, okay, if you analyze Linnaeus in the context in which Linnaeus existed, you get one answer.
If you decide to go after Linnaeus on the basis that we now know enough to understand why he was being foolish, then okay, what have you accomplished really?
It's retrospective bigoteering.
It's retrospective bigoteering.
Yep, exactly.
Okay, one more point from Kendi before we move on to our final thing, and then it looks like we're over an hour at this point.
He points out, let me actually find the quote in here, this is page 50 in this book.
At the 1988 American Heart Association Conference, he writes, a black hypertension researcher said African Americans had higher hypertension rates because only those able to retain high levels of salt survived consuming the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage.
I've bounced this off a number of colleagues, and it seems certainly plausible, Clarence Grimm told swooning reporters.
Plausibility became proof and the slavery hypertension thesis received the red carpet in the cardiovascular community in the 1990s.
Grimm did not arrive at the thesis in his research lab.
It came to him as he read Roots by Alex Haley.
Who needed scientific proof when a biological racial distinction can be imagined by reading fiction?
By reading the Bible.
So, there is so much wrong with that passage, right?
One, Kendi appears to basically be taking the possibility of selection on human beings off the table as ever being an explanation that we are allowed to speak about.
So, it's fundamentally a religious position that he is advocating for.
He clearly misunderstands what science is because the idea that a researcher got a hypothesis from a source that wasn't in his lab while wearing his white lab coat and handling glassware is of course where that's what hypothesis is.
Ideas are creativity.
They do come from serendipity.
They do come from people actually exposing themselves to ideas far and wide and being in places that they haven't been before and not foreseeing what it was that they would find.
Hypotheses are then tested through careful, rigorous observation or experimentation, depending on exactly what your test is and what the hypothesis was.
And I don't know if this has actually been tested, this hypothesis, but it is an evolutionary hypothesis that is at least plausible at the level of did the Middle Passage have selective effects on the populations that were so grotesquely ripped from their homelands and enslaved?
Yes, because we know large numbers of people died.
During the Middle Passage.
It would be, frankly, extraordinary if there had been no selection then.
Is that honorable?
Is it good?
Is that wonderful in any way?
No.
No one is making that claim.
But Kendi is taking off the table the possibility of an evolutionary explanation for any differences under any circumstances, it appears, which means he has stripped us of all of our tools.
So, again, the stripping of the tools is clearly the point.
And somehow, you either get this or you don't.
You either take all of these arguments about arithmetic not, you know, being a light thing and shut down STEM because of its...
Inherent racism or whatever you either understand that all of this is about eliminating any basis on which you could object to a claim that justifies a transfer of well-being that's really the point transfer of well-being is the is the objective and That transfer of well-being is being justified on the basis of things that are either not completely true or not at all true.
And in order to prevent them from being exposed as false, you have to get rid of all the bases on which you might establish their truth or falsity, such as logic, such as science, such as statistics.
And that's what we're facing.
These things are not under attack for no reason or out of some sort of incoherence.
It's absolutely a coherent plan about transferring well-being In the pursuit of something that is ironically being called equity, which is nothing like it, and frankly the fact that equity... Well it is, but unfortunately it is, because equity doesn't mean what we think it means.
Right.
And this is another place where you say, well of course I'm anti-racist, of course I stand for Black Lives Matter, of course I'm for equity.
Like, no, you should 100% be non-racist and also non-anti-racist.
You, of course, should understand that Black Lives Matter, but not hashtag Black Lives Matter unless you understood everything that that movement is actually standing for.
And actually, equity is not the same thing as equality, and the people who are trotting out equity as the goal know that very, very well.
What that means to them is equality of outcome.
But it doesn't even, right?
That's the claim.
The most generous interpretation of what they're saying is equality of outcome.
But the point is, even equality of outcome assumes some ability to measure when it is equal and when it isn't.
As stupid as it would be to pursue equality of outcome, obliterating the standard by which you might judge when it has been reached means that this is just transfer it all to me now Because equity will be reached when I say it's reached, and you know when it'll be reached?
Never.
They tell us that.
Yeah.
Right?
This was frequently said at Evergreen, and I've seen it repeated many times since we left, which is this job will never be done.
Yeah.
Right?
It's just going to be a continual process of transfer, and you know, that's unstable, insane, is going to create... You've got to keep all those new administrators salaried, don't you?
Oh God.
You traumatized me.
You should give me a trigger warning if you were going to mention administrators.
Sorry.
Okay, one last thing.
A viewer who is a teacher at a public, I can't remember, high school, middle school, who was forced to sit through some diversity, inclusion, equity training, shared some slides that they were shown this week.
And there are a number of them.
There's some real doozies in here.
But two of them speak to, and you can show this now if you would, Zach, the idea that some people are more monochronic and some are more polychronic in their approach to life.
Monochronic apparently meaning, you know, linear and focused on doing one thing at a time and polychronic, well, let's see, kind of just sounds like I don't even know.
What could that possibly mean?
I don't know.
It's multitasking.
Interruptions are okay for the polychronic and the nonlinear.
Work and personal is combined in this case, and for the monochronic it's about punctuality and work and personal life separate.
Literally in this training, which is supposed to be this anti-racist, diversity, equity and inclusion training, they are claiming that certain populations are more likely to be monochronic versus polychronic.
Apparently, what I'm told by the person who had to sit through this is that this is given as a reason that maybe people from certain backgrounds should not be expected to respond to deadlines and schedules the same way as other people.
Which is obviously completely racist, and is also completely the opposite of anything that Kendi would say qualifies as anti-racist.
Furthermore, this idea of monochronic versus polychronic, which is just a very strange way of, to my mind, of imagining how people are Going through the world, but are there differences between people in terms of their understanding of time, and might some of those differences be cultural?
Maybe.
And in fact, this harks back to apparently a... Let's see if I can find it.
I didn't write it down here.
An essay by an anthropologist from many decades ago in which he proposed that some cultures actually have less of a focus on a linear sort of unitasking time, and some cultures have more of a focus on multitasking.
Maybe, it's possible, but that's about culture.
It's not about people, right?
So the idea that African Americans who've grown up in America with their supposed monochronic sense of time would have something genetic that is feeding them a different sense of time and scheduling is actually, that's kind of old school racist is what that is.
That's not even the new racism, that's old school racism.
Well, it's thoroughly confused.
So I must say, I actually think the weird thing here is what I would call clock time or laboratory time.
These are not normal features of human timekeeping.
And the thing is, the human brain is amazingly capable of keeping track of time, both at like musical scales and daily scales.
In the absence of clock time, the brain does remarkable things with time.
And it is very nonlinear.
And then we invent a reliable clock, which is, of course, useful because it means you can tell somebody, you know, meet me there at this time.
And that's a very valuable thing to be able to do.
But nonetheless, what it does is it regiments time to an arbitrary phenomenon.
Which is real, but the arbitrary version then imposes itself on the rest of it.
In other words, your day might change in length as the day length changes, right?
Because that's a perfectly... it's not an arbitrary fact.
The fact that daylight is something that you make use of means that as there's less of it during the day, it may in fact make quite a bit of sense to sleep longer so that you're not burning energy pointlessly.
So we create clock time and suddenly you're getting up in the dark and confusing yourself and having trouble going to sleep when you should because you've arbitrarily disrupted this thing.
So what I would argue is that every population is liable to have had a flexible relationship to time based on the fact that time, you know, uh, it only gets it all regular if you're very near the equator for one thing, right?
Day length.
Yes.
- Photo parents. - Yes.
So the, you make the right point, which is I would expect these things to be flexible at a cultural software level.
It may indeed be the case that some populations... It may be pre-industrial, post-industrial... It could be pre-industrial, post-industrial... It could be pre-globalization, post-globalization...
Right.
that in some neighborhoods clock time matters more.
It could even be that what they're calling polychronic is contagious because in a neighborhood where people, I mean, you know, we joke about this when we travel.
Island time is different, right?
In many places, you know, you can, you know, in Madagascar, right? - I believe we once waited days for something that was supposed to come within a few minutes.
Absolutely.
No, for sure we did.
Boats, Taxi Bruce.
Oh, all the time.
Angamba Rupitsu.
Angamba Rupitsu.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe tomorrow.
Will it come tomorrow?
Angamba?
I don't know.
Angamba Rupitsu.
Could be a week from now, right?
But I'm going to tell you, maybe tomorrow.
So that's a kind of... Don't want to kill off hope and time.
Decreased obligation to clock time.
But anyway, the point is, look, there's every reason that different populations would have a different relationship.
It's quite possible that some of the different relationship is actually different as a result of the fact that in a racist past society, different things were rewarded.
Is there any reason to expect that to be encoded at the genetic level?
No.
No way.
No.
No way.
You could have tropical populations, for example, have less sensitivity to day length because it's less of an indicator of what time of year you're in.
I mean, you know, it's possible, but there's no reason at all to assume that that's where these things come from, especially since the clock is so freaking new that to the extent that some of us are rigged around a regimented clock in which a second takes about a second every single time.
That that is the novel phenomenon that has been imposed over the top of all of these other potentially more practical versions of relationship to time.
Yeah, so I mean at some level it's possible once again that there's some like kernel of Like recognition that there's a problem with the system that most of us are having to live by, and an appeal to fix it.
But this appeal comes in this crazy racialized interpretation that can't be right and wouldn't be a reasonable fix.
If it were, but you know, when we've got our teenagers getting up at the same moment that is for most of the year before it is even light out, if we're really far from the equator in order to go to school to learn something that has nothing to do with the thing they're going to be learning in the next 50 minutes, like none of that looks anything like our past, nor does really... I haven't, I have yet to meet the deep thinking, good faith person who thinks that that's the best way to educate kids.
I just, it does, those people don't exist.
There are people who haven't thought about it much whose knee-jerk reaction is, oh yeah, it must be good, it's how it's always been done.
But deep-thinking, good-faith people know that this is not the way to educate children, nor is it likely to be the best way to get the best work out of people when they have to get up for much of the year if they live far from the equator.
before it's light out and get themselves to work and pretend that it feels the same in December as it does in June when they've got some light on their skin from, you know, getting to work because it's near the summer solstice versus the winter solstice.
It's patently not the same and pretending that we can simply make, you know, every day of the year the same, much like pretending that we can make every human being the same just because we want to, isn't going to be effective.
So I think the take-home message for me from this conversation is that everything goes to hell as a result of the categorical nature of the claims.
Now there are claims that are categorical, right?
A periodic table of elements is a categorical claim about the way matter is composed at the level of chemistry.
So, I'm not saying there are no claims that are categorical, but the kinds of claims that are being made categorical are deranging us because they are not inherently of that type.
So, the idea that, well, I'm going to assert that there are exactly two categories.
There is racist and there is anti-racist and then I'm going to evaluate everything and tell you which basket it's in when there is another category that obviously should exist.
Means that we can't have a rational conversation because we have dichotomized something that isn't dichotomous and Imagine the difference in the world if we were actually in a conversation in which the idea was Okay, I'm gonna say something everything is either racist or it's anti-racist Do you agree or disagree and we'll find out what category you're in right?
It's like, okay.
I That's a trick question, right?
It's a satanic game show.
It's a satanic game show, right.
And so the point is, look, at the point you sign up for that, you've already lost.
Yeah.
Because you're going to be forced into a category which is either going to turn you subservient as a result of the fact it's going to dictate your actions, or you're going to be declared the stigmatized thing and we're going to take your stuff.
Yeah.
So you either put up a don't hurt me wall as you realize that you've fallen into one of those categories, or you flee for the hills.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, I think that's useful.
Yeah, I think that is useful too, actually.
The deranging categorization of things that are not actually ripe for categorization.
Good.
Yes.
Okay.
So we will take about a 15-minute break and come back after that to answer your Super Chat questions from this hour and from next hour and a couple from the last episode.
You can join us on my Patreon to get access to a private Q&A once a month, and you can join us on either of our Patreons to access the private Discord server.
There's a Clips channel with clips of these episodes, and do you want to give any Unity updates or not?
There will be Unity updates upcoming.
We have a new animation that we would like to show you and have you spread it around if you were at all willing.
Things are marching ahead in the land of Unity and the Democrats have in fact taken the word Unity, which we are flattered by, and have decided to abuse it by using it for partisan purposes, which we are dismayed by.
